Five to Thrive Week 5

UMD’s Thriving Workplace Initiative is making the University of Maryland a great place to work by providing tools and support to foster engaged, inclusive and empowered faculty and staff across campus.

Each Monday, its Five to Thrive list offers five strategies crowdsourced from research, experts and our own UMD community to help your workplace thrive.

Want to build a Thriving Workplace? Here are this week’s tips:

• Recognize and be sensitive to the multiple roles of some employees (for instance, working in the office by day, teaching at night or going off to another job).
   
• “You should know this person”: Make introductions to people on campus who don’t know each other but have aligned missions or interests.
   
• Follow the philosophy “There’s no such thing as a bad idea.” Incorporate fun brainstorming sessions into team meetings. Storyboarding and doodling help visualize, while free apps like Candor allow pressure-free pre-meeting creativity.
   
• Identify how to interact and communicate with different generations. Consider using different tools to reach out, such as face-to-face meetings, email, texts and social media. When in doubt, ask.
   
• Forgive failures. Trying new things sometimes involves failing, but it encourages innovation and teaches. By embracing failure, you encourage productive risk-taking.

Want more tips? Visit the Thriving Workplace Resource Library here or sign up for Food for Thought Friday, which delivers strategies to your inbox each week. Send an email to thrivingworkplace@umd.edu with the subject listserv to subscribe.